Little People (28 page)

Now the chances are that you, poor underprivileged stay-at-home that you are, will probably never get to travel for several hours in a plastic bag. Instead, you want me to describe what it was like for you, so that you can live the experience vicariously by means of the small miracle of imagination.

Believe me, you don't want to know. If you're the sort of reckless contaminant floating on the scummy surface of the gene pool who makes a habit of ignoring the well-meant advice of wiser sufferers, you'll probably have a shot at imagining it anyway, so here's a few pointers, just to steer you towards the right kind of nightmare. Think of a football-pitch-sized trampoline, or a Bouncy Castle of Doom, or a zero-gravity padded cell that has suddenly come alive and decided it's hungry. Think of all this happening for a
long
time, and please also bear in mind that there are no toilets in carrier bags, not even Marks & Sparks ones. In other words, think scary, painful, undignified, unpredictable and extremely sordid.

Still, most bad things come to an end, and eventually the hamster-in-a-blender sensation slowed down and stopped. I was still trying to make up my mind whether or not this was a good thing or just something even worse getting ready to happen when the world suddenly flipped upside down and shot me out onto a cold, hard, concrete floor.

At least that cleared up one point for me; to paraphrase Lennon and McCartney, you dunno how lucky you are, boy, back in the Marks & Spencer carrier bag.

Most of what I dislike about cold, hard floors can be summed up in the two words ‘cold' and ‘hard'. My physics education was rudely interrupted just as I was getting to the good bit, so I can't actually lay my hand on my heart and tell you for certain that a hard surface is harder when you're knee high to a Cabbage Patch Doll than it would be for, say, a seven-foot-tall professional basketball player, and the same reservation obviously applies to coolth. It just feels that way, that's all.

No point in moving around; in fact, being small and invisible and therefore at extreme risk of being trodden on if I started wandering around like a one-man nomadic tribe, the only sensible course of action was to stay put and wait for someone to come and tell me what to do. So I did, and they didn't; not for a very long time. If you've ever wondered whether it's possible to be scared into a jelly and bored stiff at the same time, let me assure you that it is. In fact, it's dead easy; no previous experience or specialist equipment necessary.

To my surprise, when the Main Cop finally did show up, it turned out to be an elf; on the large side, sure, at least six and an eighth inches tall, maybe as much as six and a quarter, but not the agonising strain on the neck tendons I'd been anticipating. When I heard his voice behind me, of course, I instinctively looked straight up in the air.

‘No, you clown, down here,' the voice corrected me, and I got the impression that maybe I'd started off the foreman/junior-assistant-nonentity relationship on the wrong foot. ‘So you're him, then,' the voice went on, as I lowered my chin looking for its source. ‘The freak.'

Bear in mind that I'd met elves, rather more of them than I'd ever wanted to, and the ones I'd been hanging out with recently were all pleasant, friendly, hospitable, kindly folks, gentle and polite to the point of violent nausea. They were also, of course, on the other side of the line; on the side where I was a loud-mouthed, overbearing jerk. Of course I should have anticipated the effect of that syndrome, like changing the signs when you take away the brackets in algebra; but I didn't. Tsk. And me a Nobel prizewinner.

‘Freak?' I repeated. ‘Oh, you mean—'

With that size and complexion and those ears, he was indisputably an elf, couldn't have been anything else.

But not only did he sound different from the ones on the other side, he looked different too. Where the Elfland elves had been long and thin, like supermodels hung over a radiator to dry out, he resembled your stereotypical Alabama police sergeant, only with added neck density and smaller, beadier eyes. I can't say I took to him.

‘Freak,' he said, with lots and lots of emphasis. ‘You got a problem with that?'

I thought about it and decided I didn't. Eminently fair and admirably concise, I reckoned. I shook my head. ‘No, sir,' I said. I guessed he was probably the sort of person who liked being called ‘Sir'. Most thoroughly unpleasant people do, in my experience.

‘And don't call me that,' he snapped, making me wonder if perhaps I'd misjudged him. ‘You call the manager ‘sir'. You call me ‘boss'. You got that?'

‘Yes,' I replied. ‘Boss.'

He frowned; it was like watching a rockslide on Mount Rushmore, to the point where you expected to see miniature Cary Grants and James Masons slugging it out on the bridge of his nose. ‘OK,' he grunted, ‘but you're still a freak, and I've got my eye on you. Understood?'

I wanted to assure him that he'd explained all the relevant factors so lucidly that even someone of my limited intelligence had no trouble at all in grasping all the salient points; but it occurred to me that if I said all that in words he'd probably think I was being funny and kick my ears inside my head, whereas if I stuck to body language, the worst that'd happen if I cocked it up would be him thinking I'd got epilepsy or a nervous tic or something. So I nodded.

He didn't react to my nod, so I suppose I judged it about right. ‘Just remember, though,' he grunted, ‘the first sign of trouble from you and I'll know what to do. All right, follow me.'

Well, it wasn't as if I had a non-lethal choice. So I followed him.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

T
he first thing that struck me about my new surroundings was the scale, and boy, was I relieved. Everything was the proper size – well, not everything; the doorways loomed overhead like triumphal arches, and the windows were set neck-crickingly high in the soaring walls, giving me the feeling I was in a cathedral. But the stuff that actually mattered, like chairs and tables and benches, were all the right height, and so were the people.

There were a
lot
of people. All elves, needless to say: pointed ears, greenish complexions. They were far greener than Elfland elves; I eventually found out that there was a sound scientific reason for this, something to do with light travelling at a different speed over there – either this was the reason the locals could play games with linear chronology, or else their continual faffing about with time had resulted in it getting seriously bent, with knock-on effects to several other constants. In any case, the Elfland spectrum isn't nearly as inflexible as ours, which may also have something to do with the fact that their rainbows really do have ends, and pots of gold to go with them. According to the elf who told me about this stuff, all the time I was in Elfland, the locals would have perceived me as being a garish shade of orange, though naturally they'd been far too polite to mention it.

A lot of elves, then; and all of them without exception dead miserable and snotty. To what degree this was due to them being the opposites of the sweet-natured folk they'd have been on their own side of the line, and how much of it was the result of being banged up in a sweatshop and forced to make shoes for a psychotic Nazi, I never did find out. Six of one, I guess. It didn't take me long – about five seconds, in fact – to realise that they didn't like me, either.

The first four of these five seconds were taken up with the foreman telling the congregated workforce that I was the new guy, and as they could see from my ears I was only half an elf and therefore a freak, but even so he'd rather they didn't kill me outright, since he was accountable to management for staffing levels. The fifth second was a moment of complete and utter silence as they all turned round and stared at me. At the end of that second, I'd pretty well got the message.

Whether it was because they didn't want to get the foreman into trouble, or because they were too demoralised and generally pissed off to bother, they didn't immediately rise up and lynch me or beat me to a pulp. When they'd finished staring – a second and a half was all it took to download all they needed to know about me, apparently – they turned round and got on with what they were doing, namely their mid-morning break, which they spent standing around in small, wretched groups with their hands by their sides, muttering in low, unhappy voices. I soon discovered that this was pretty much the high point of their day.

The foreman looked at me, shook his head sadly, and wandered off, leaving me standing there on my own on the edge of the mob of sad elves, and I decided that it was now my turn to look at them. There wasn't really a lot to see, since it was well-nigh impossible to tell them apart. They were all more or less the same height, dressed in extremely similar shabby green boiler suits and clumping engineers' boots, and they all slumped in more or less the same way (head forward, shoulders drooping, knees very slightly bent, hands dangling on the ends of arms like defeated conkers). It's hard to imagine a sadder, more disheatened and despondent collection of life forms anywhere in time and space, with the possible exception of the Conservative party after the 1997 general election.

I suppose I hadn't been there for more than ten minutes (which, in context, felt like slightly over a million years) when a sadder-than-average-looking elf peeled off from the crowd and trudged towards me, moving with all the snap and vigour of an exhausted man wading through waist-deep semolina. He looked older than most of them; his hair was getting thin and tufty on top, and even the points of his ears looked like they were wilting. ‘You,' he said.

There's not a lot you can say by way of reply to ‘You', sighed at you by someone who looks like he's spent the last hundred years down the back of a sofa. I tried to look respectfully alert and attentive. I'm morally certain he didn't notice.

‘You're with me,' he said, in a tone of voice that suggested that that was the most depressing and dismal fact he'd ever had to come to terms with. ‘I'm putting you in the stockroom.'

‘Ah,' I said. Right.' I toyed with adding
thank you
or something like that, but decided not to, in case he took it the wrong way. I'd got the distinct feeling that in the prevailing culture, pretty well any remark over two syllables long would probably be interpreted as a mortal insult requiring settlement in blood.

‘Right, then,' he replied. ‘You'd better follow me, then.'

He led me across the huge floor towards a Marble Arch-sized doorway in the opposite wall. It was a long walk, but at least it gave me the opportunity to look about me and take in the scenery. Under other circumstances, I might even have been impressed; the sheer size of the place, as seen from my perspective, lent it a certain air of grandeur. Imagine St Mark's in Venice after a raid by a bunch of really dedicated bailiffs. Other aspects, however, weren't quite so impressive; the dust was OK, it was almost like walking along a sandy beach, but the cobwebs started my imagination off along distinctly unsettling avenues. When you're six inches tall, arachnophobia is less of a psychological disorder and more of a survival trait.

As I followed the sad elf I did make a real effort to get my bearings, or at least try and remember which way we'd come, but it wasn't long before I gave up. The trouble is that when you're walking through a succession of spaces so overwhelmingly huge that you have trouble seeing the opposite wall until you're halfway across the room, it's quite hard to maintain a sense of direction. Think what it'd be like trying to navigate if you were travelling through intergalactic space from the Milky Way to Andromeda on foot.

The upshot was that after an hour or so I fell into a sort of dazed trance, and when the sad elf suddenly stopped and said, ‘Well, we're here', I'd lost track of pretty well everything. I couldn't actually see what differentiated
here
from anywhere else; the place we'd stopped in was a double-Wembley-sized concrete-floored desert, and although I could just about make out vague shapes on the horizon, I didn't have a clue what they were. Could've been pyramids or mountains or medium-sized cities, for all I knew.

‘Right,' I said. ‘Um, where is this?'

‘Stockroom,' whispered the sad elf, as if acknowledging a deadly secret he'd managed to keep hidden for the last forty years. ‘It's where we keep stuff.'

Oh
, I thought,
that sort of stockroom
. ‘What would you like me to do?' I asked.

The look in his eyes answered that question more eloquently than words ever could, and if he'd insisted, the result would have been extremely uncomfortable and ultimately fatal. But what he said was, ‘You can start on loading trolleys. Try not to bugger it up, it's hard enough as it is.'

‘Okay,' I said, making it sound a bit like a major concession during international trade negotiations. ‘Um, can someone show me what to do, or . . . ?'

His head slumped even further forward, implying he had a triple-jointed neck. ‘Yeah, why not?' he replied, as if to suggest that everything was so far gone that nothing really mattered any more. ‘Come with me, I'll show you myself.'

‘Thanks,' I said, but he managed to rise above it.

We walked on in silence for a few minutes, to the point where I began to make out recognisable shapes in the distance. On the walls there were shelves, the usual steel angle-iron type bolted together like good old-fashioned Meccano, except that each shelving unit was the size of the Pompidou Centre. Fortunately there were lifts from the ground to each shelf, and running along each shelf a little railway line, beside which gangs of elves, each gang between twenty and fifty strong, were hauling about such things as cardboard boxes, reels of thread and rolls of canvas. Each item was mounted on a sled and tied down to stop it toppling off and flattening the crew, and the gangs were hauling on ropes like students re-enacting the building of Stonehenge. When they reached the railhead there were derricks and cranes to hoist the load off the sled and onto a flatbed truck, which waited in a siding till a locomotive arrived to haul it to the lift shaft. I noticed that all the railway stuff – track and rolling stock and engines - was the same Hornby Dublo I'd had in my train set when I was a kid.